The ability to provision and configure “bare-metal” computers across a network is important to organizations where network security and integrity are important. A “bare-metal” computer is a computer with no operating system installed on it. When a bare-metal computer is obtained from either an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or another supplier, the purchaser has no way of knowing if the computer has been compromised before connecting it to a network. In particular, pre-boot viruses and defects are currently opaque to provisioning solutions.
Past approaches to this problem have suffered from issues of inefficiency, lack of scalability, inconvenience, and/or licensing.
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention are now described with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is generally indicated by the left-most digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.